I was hacked. Fiends assumed my Facebook identity. I have no idea what they imagined they’d get by chopping up my account. Perhaps they were trying to sell me for parts. Whatever their goal, they shoplifted my photograph and set up an imitation Gina Barreca profile.

Do you remember the television game show “To Tell the Truth”? A panel of celebrities had to decide which of three contestants was the real person and which were impostors.

about the author

Gina Barreca is an English professor at the University of Connecticut, author of nine books and a Hartford Courant columnist. She can be contacted at: ginabarreca.com.

Basically, that’s what I spent most of last week doing, except instead of performing in front of Orson Bean, Don Ameche and Kitty Carlisle, I was trying to convince a series of nameless Facebook team members that I was myself.

I spent days sending detailed emails to a generic Facebook address essentially explaining “I Gotta Be Me.” They didn’t care, and it didn’t work.

Facebook said I didn’t have a problem. Apparently pretending to be somebody else and sending out greetings under that person’s name while posing under that person’s face “doesn’t go against our community standards.”

I bet the internet predators thought my life was filled with limos, private jets and Fra Angelicos (the Renaissance painter – not Frangelico, the liqueur, which I am far more likely to have). Maybe they didn’t know it’s taken 59 years for the real me to save money toward retirement, settle my debts with Visa and pay off my student loans.

Or maybe the hackers thought my Facebook friends would simply assume I’d deliberately split myself into the nascent personalities I’d previously kept in check via diligent mental health care, and that they would agree to start sending these new personalities wads of small, nonsequential bills or major organs on ice.

Here’s the good news: The smart cookies who are my Facebook friends discovered Fake Gina before I did and alerted me to what was happening. That’s the sort of watching-out-for-each-other I expect from “The Tribe of Loud Smart Funny Women and the Men Who Laugh With Us,” as I refer to my friends.

They make up for the bad behavior of the scoundrels, but I’m not sure they make up for Facebook’s laissez-faire attitude.

Instead of relying on Facebook’s experts, I turned to my tribe for help.

Susan Kastan, a pal from college, became my electronic guardian angel by walking me through the steps I needed to protect myself and my group.

Brave souls had already done this, and they’d notified me as well. “Did you just send out a new FB friend request, or did your account get hacked?” they asked. A Victorianist who specializes in the Gothic novel put it this way: “Were you compromised during the night?”

Even braver companions had engaged with the hacker to see whether they could track down useful information, accepting the “friend requests” sent out by Evil Fake Gina.

Yale’s John Squeri did the computer equivalent of wearing my colors into battle. John agreed to join a conversation with Evil Fake Gina via Facebook message. As soon as he got a message saying “helo! u r amazing,” he reported the account to Facebook as “pretending to be” someone he knew.

Obviously, John is amazing, but he’s also correct in knowing I wouldn’t offer any compliment by writing “u r” something. Or anything. Ever.

None of my friends has sent money or body parts, so apparently nobody has been hurt.

Eventually, Evil Fake Gina took down the stolen photo and replaced it with a silhouette of a person wearing a pageboy haircut.

But my tribe knew that, even if I were appearing anonymously in disguise as part of the witness protection program, I would never choose to display myself in a pageboy.

My tech friends tell me Evil Fake Gina is probably a robot, that such identity theft happens all the time on Facebook and that I shouldn’t take it personally.

Fine. But if you get a friend request from an English teacher who can’t spell “helo” and who chirps “u funny,” please don’t accept it.

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